Believe it or not, every time a customer does business with you they come in with expectations both spoken and unspoken. So, how do we manage those and shape those to match what we have to offer? Well, let’s talk about that today!
Happy Monday friends, Thomas Joyner here with Business on Purpose.
Last week, my wife found a deal online. $79 bucks for your first visit. Introductory offer, book here. She ended up calling the office to make an appointment and was so excited to go. She sat down, went through the full experience, and absolutely loved it! About halfway through, the receptionist came over and brought her bill. $240!!!
She immediately texted me and was pretty bummed. I told her to just show them the intro web page and ask about it.
“Oh, that’s an old promotion. Sorry about that.” And that was it. No one told her as she was running up a bill more than 3 times what she expected. Nope, just added to it and didn’t even flinch.
After her having a short conversation with the receptionist, they lowered it to $200 and she left.
But here’s the frustrating part. The service was amazing. Probably worth every bit of the 200 bucks she paid. The place was clean, the service amazing, the staff friendly…and yet because she walked in with an incredibly different expectation for price, she left with a bad taste in her mouth and unable to recommend the place or really want to go back. It felt like a bait and switch.
And to this day, the promotion is still up online… further adding to the belief that it’s a bait and switch.
Let me flip over to the other side of the equation. The Savannah Bananas minor league baseball team. The first time I went I was a little shocked at how much tickets cost. I’m used to paying 10 bucks or so for minor league night with the Charleston River dogs.
I noticed that the price was a good bit higher, starting around 25 bucks, so I was curious if it would be worth it.
From the moment we stepped foot at the stadium, we were entertained. High-fived, laughed, high energy, all the food and drink you could want all included, not wanting to miss a minute of the action.
We left feeling like we would have paid double the price for what we got and the actual product far exceeded what we knew we were going to pay.
See the difference?
So, if you were to look at your marketing and sales…where do you fail to live up to the expectations? Maybe you need to start by simply writing down the expectations your customers arrive with. And then one by one walking through them and addressing them. If it’s timely service, how can you meet or exceed that? If it’s value pricing (if that’s your goal), how can you be upfront about that to exceed the customers expectations?
Maybe it’s being innovative and providing new solutions… how do you stack up? Maybe it’s having a team that is friendly and joyful? Send some surveys out to customers to find out how you stack up or call up someone you do business with, take them to lunch, and just ask. They will tell you!
Because here’s the thing… this goes for relationships, dating, business, everything! Discontentment is a direct result of unmet expectations!
But if you learn to manage and understand and exceed expectations, or set them appropriately ahead of time…you will create raving fans in your business with long-term relationships where customers come back time and time again.
The opposite, of not knowing what expectations are out there or maybe even manipulating them to get people in the door is shortsighted at best and a horrible business model.
There’s a word that one of my mentors walked me through years ago. Congruence…it’s this thought that what’s on the outside matches what’s on the inside. I think we spend too much time trying to hide one or the other instead of matching the two up and being who we say we are and showing who we say we are.
Once we learn to set appropriate expectations and deliver or exceed those expectations, we can finally be a business that will get referred by everyone we do business with.
So sit down today, create a list of expectations our clients have, and see where we stack up! Do it! Put in the time and see where you land.
Thanks!
Bob Roberts is a larger-than-life Baptist Preacher turned global engagement pioneer and independent global diplomat whose best friends are with people far outside of his own East Texas tribe.
Bob began mentoring me two decades ago with his words, his actions, and his time. I’ll never forget the day he drove me to Barnes and Noble in the mid-cities of the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex and loaded me up with what today are foundational books in my personal library.
Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy, and Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat were two of the books that he bought for me (still two of my top 5 all-time reads). There were a couple of nuanced books that threw me off; a book from Henri Nouwen and another about the now renowned Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh.
Perplexed, I dove into the books on global engagement as they spoke to my inner desire for circumnavigate-able adventure. Nouwen and van Gogh would wait.
Twenty years later I picked up a book entitled Learning from Henri Nouwen and Vincent Van Gogh, that then led me to another Nouwen title The Way Of The Heart.
We are asked frequently by business owners, “why do I feel like I work day and night and yet get nothing done?”
Nouwen makes reference to a “wordy world” that we inhabit and then lobs this thought, “we move through life in such a distracted way that we do not even take the time and rest to wonder if any of the things we think, say, or do are worth thinking, saying, or doing.”
Van Gogh is said to have been largely unrecognized while alive except among those who knew him and his tight circle of outcasts.
Although, van Gogh had long sense passed when Nouwen was alive, Nouwen wanted to understand van Gogh’s relentless pursuit of a compassionate life… a life that compelled him to shed ministerial garb for the poverty-stained garments and conditions of Dutch peasants.
Nouwen built a relationship with Dr. Vincent Van Gogh, the artist’s nephew who was key in the realization of the museum that bears his last name in Amsterdam.
Carol Berry writes in Learning, “Henri asked (Dr. Van Gogh) why so many people flocked daily by the thousands to look at his uncle’s paintings. What was it about Vincent that touched a chord that resonated deeply within us? Henri related Dr. Van Gogh’s answer: ‘Because people feel comforted and consoled. Vincent was able to crawl under the skin of nature and people and find there something truthful, something beautiful, something joyful, and something worth seeing. He was able to draw out the inner secret of what he saw.’”
Here is the question for us as business owners.
How was Bob able to make the time to take me to a bookstore two decades ago and plant powerful seeds of books that would circle back to make influence twenty years later?
How was Carol Berry able to share wisdom and insight from two major influencers of human compassion from the academic world and the art world?
How was van Gogh able to “crawl under the skin of nature and people and find there something truthful?”
Each one made a singular decision; ignore the other things they could have done and commit to the important things that require their uniqueness and imagination.
Skye Jethani writes in his book The Divine Commodity that van Gogh, “warned other artists, ‘Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.’”
Put another way, do not become a slave to monotonous distraction.
Jethani goes on to say, “we’ve been conditioned to avoid silence at all costs lest we be confronted with our own inner chaos…and where there is no exterior noise we feverishly work to produce it.”
When we submit ourselves to constant distraction, to the latest, loudest voice, or worse, when we manufacture our own distraction, we are selling our soul, our creativity, our narrow brilliance for the empty currency of non-caloric entertainment that will need to be refreshed and even more outrageous in an hour.
How do we limit distractions? Begin practicing solitude.
Isolation is not solitude. Nouwen describes solitude as “the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self…solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born.”
You will not find solitude, you must make…make time, make place, make opportunity to sit and be confronted with imagination, with thought, with anger, frustration, joy, and excitement. Without seeing those things, we cannot experience those things.
For some of you business has become a tired, repetitive cycle moving from frustration to frustration. You have become the slave to your model and the freshness of your dreams and imagination have died.
Distraction is not just robbing productivity…it is robbing your soul.
Might I suggest you make time to walk into a bookstore and find a book on Van Gogh and just stare at the pictures for a while, and may that help rekindle your imagination and inspiration for the mission of your business.
Or, you go back to scrolling your feed.
If you are comparing your 2022 to 2020 and 2021 you may want to pause.
Standing here at the early sunset hours of 2022 we are feeling a very real metaphor.
It goes like this.
During 2020 and 2021 many of our businesses were barreling down the business highway at 90 mph winding hot at 10,000 RPMs.
Today, it already feels like a massive slowdown, and it has been. Let’s not lose perspective, though… instead of going from 90 mph to 0…we are now riding down the highway at a more sustainable, more comfortable pace of 70 mph, and the good news is that we are only running at 5,000 RPMs.
In other words, it is taking far less effort to go just a little bit slower and start to get some breathing room.
The problem is that our human minds have grown accustomed to the speed, breathlessness, chaos, and cash flow of the past two years and we don’t know how to mentally or emotionally throttle our expectations, let alone our spending habits.
New norms have emerged over the past two years; pricing volatility, material, and logistics inconsistencies, marketing and sales simplicities, and probably the most noticeable internally is that your employees want more money for the same roles and while demanding more flexibility and meaning. Employees want their business life to fuel their personal lives, and not the other way around.
Historically, business owners have tried to solve headaches by shooting one particular shiny bullet…sales, sales, sales.
If we could just get more work then we would have more cash to pay higher fees, higher premiums, higher wages, higher demands, and higher expectations.
That is an infinite and empty treadmill leading to the same destination over and over.
I am going to walk you through the four steps you need to take to navigate your business in 2023 in a powerful way.
The first step in building your business plan for 2023 is making time to fill out your Vision Story.
In 2023, where vision is not written down, people will indeed scatter, and that scattering of people will further scatter your mind and thoughts into a web of frustration.
Instead, follow the ancient Jewish wisdom that says, “write the vision down so that those who read it may run.”
Vision is clarifying and vision is separating. When you cast vision you know who is bought in and who is not. Some will run towards your vision and some away from your vision.
You will be tempted to scoot on past writing your vision down and instead make up some silly excuse in your head that either, “I don’t need this” or “oh yeah, we’ve got something like that”.
We’ve made crafting your vision simple.
Seven categories to begin working through, and you will likely need to make about an hour or so of time for this powerful and important exercise. Notice I said the word exercise… it’s work and it’s healthy.
The second necessary tool in your 2023 business planning toolkit is the sobering Delegation Roadmap.
Andrew Carnegie said, "No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit."
John Maxwell said, “If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.”
Discovering delegation will make time for what matters most in three ways:
The moment that you stop delegating, or choose to not delegate and empower is the moment that you have chosen to have a job instead of owning a business.
The third necessary tool in your 2023 business planning toolkit is the non-negotiable Weekly Schedule.
You feel busy but not productive because you have little to no boundaries.
I recently heard Lance Golinghorst articulate that we all have access to three major scarce resources: time, energy, and attention.
Attention is indivisible. It is well-researched that multitasking doesn’t work. As I am writing and reading this, I should not be brushing my teeth or checking my bank balance.
Energy is renewable (I can generate more energy), and transferable (I can give you energy and you can give me energy).
The real wake-up call is in regard to our time. Time is non-renewable (we cannot make more of it), and it is not transferable (you cannot give yours to me).
You go into each week with a defined, finite allotment of time. Either you put boundaries throughout your day roping off all of the tasks and responsibilities, or we will do it for you.
If you do it, it allows you to maximize your scarce resources of time, energy, and attention. If we do it for you, then we will devour your time, energy, and attention.
You can make excuses as to why it won’t work in the specific role you are in. We love you, but your role is not a special unicorn or snowflake. Own your role by owning the boundaries for your role and then share those boundaries with us so we can support you.
Finally, for a robust 2023 business plan, you will benefit from building and implementing a Culture Calendar.
The culture of your business is not happenstance...it is not an accident, and no luck is required.
The culture of your business is a DIRECT RESULT of the ingredients that you allow to enter the mash bill.
If you allow the ingredients of unpredictability, inconsistency, minimal communication, lack of process, lack of mission, gossip, and no values in decision-making, then the result will be a business that has notes of unpredictability, lack of process, and the like.
If, however, you allow only the ingredients of consistent communication, accountability, humor, reinforced process, and clarity in vision, mission, and values, then the result will be a business that has notes of the same.
Again, the four tools that will change the game for you and your team in 2023.
Our mission is to help liberate business owners, like you, from chaos to make time for the things that matter most. Working 70 hours a week is NOT what matters most…empowering others to live into their narrow brilliance IS what matters most.
Remember, when you choose to implement, you are choosing to cut the chaos and make time for what matters most.
Joe Calloway said it, “vision without implementation is hallucination.”
Amidst the chaos of a recession, there are many who see opportunity and possibility tucked away in a larger population that submits blindly to doom and gloom.
We have always had a few business owners in the past with a desire to expand into new markets, and yet the drumbeat of expansion is ironically higher now in a tough, recession-bent market.
These are trade contractors who are realizing that the purpose, people, process, and profit they have built has positioned their business in a place of strength while other like-businesses are suffering under the weight of volatile cash flow.
Growing markets need to have the same care and attention as growing new agricultural fields. When left to grow without curation, a business can look like a garden that has grown past its boundaries.
Our town right now is a bazaar example of this. Its population has grown at race car speeds and yet the town services divisions are struggling to keep up. Much of our physical landscape was designed to be beautiful and boundaries. Due to the struggle of keeping up, the vegetation has started spilling out over the borders onto the streets and looking a bit more haggard; it is unkept.
That’s how a business feels when uncontrolled and undisciplined growth occurs. It is growth, but not all growth is healthy.
I once cut back a shrub that had grown far too large and was left with nothing but a brown stem because the growth required larger and larger support until the fruit of that support was gone. What was left was the support structure (management), with no fruit (revenue).
Good growth requires thoughtful planning.
Thoughtful planning required clarity and boundaries.
Here are five steps all business owners can take to filter growth to determine expansion into new markets.
First, you must have a sincere desire to grow.
Skill or demand without desire is like a vehicle with no fuel…the vehicle is capable, the road is inviting, but there is no gas in the tank to make it move.
Growth demands time, effort, energy, and forward motion. Ideas are fun but low on action. Action is long-term and sustained.
The good news is that you now have an idea of the effort required to expand due to the time and effort put into the initial growth of the business.
As you grow, you will likely require more people. Do you have that desire?
Second, you will want to have demonstrated and tracked measurables of your existing business so you have objective numbers to run pro formas and forecasts.
Again, since you have already started and grown your existing business, take the numbers that business has already provided and apply those numbers to a new potential market, and then run scenarios from those numbers that are higher and lower.
Do not waste the knowledge that you have worked so hard to gain and settle for, “well, we’ll just figure it out.” That mindset will drain desire quickly.
The third step in expansion is to create a replicable roadmap for expansion. Looking in the mirror on the business that you have already launched, what were the non-negotiable steps that you have learned to take that will apply to expansion?
What is the ideal location? Who is the ideal client or customer? What makes an ideal team member and how have we trained them successfully? What is the culture we are birthing this new expansion out of, and how will that culture fall in line with what currently exists?
Many of the businesses that we have coached through expansion have resulted in a simple spreadsheet checklist of items that each new expansion would need.
Next, to expand you must identify persons-of-peace. Who are those connections within the community you wish to expand to who identify with your mission and are connected to your ideal clients?
Every location has a minority of the population who will turn out to be raving supporters of your mission. In order to buy in and herald your mission though, you must have abundant clarity of that mission and be ready to share the mission in a succinct way along with a simple value proposition answering who you help, what you do to help, how that help is delivered, and what the result of your help will be.
A fifth element to evaluate when expanding into new markets is to find out if there is already someone there that you could acquire that would love to come in line with your mission and your culture.
There are thousands in the business owner community who have the technical skill, the demand, and the desire, but they have always struggled to run a business focused on purpose, people, process, and profit. Your expansion could be the very opportunity they are looking for to do their work in a meaningful and fulfilling way, but not have the burden of business ownership.
Your running a business on purpose is an attractive hope for many who run a business void of purpose.
Expansion is a natural, exciting prospect when methodically and thoughtfully worked through with an open hand and mind, and an eye on the ultimate vision of your business.
It’s October! As crazy as that sounds. And I’m curious…when was the last time you looked at the goals you set at the beginning of the year? Have you looked at them yet? Or are they collecting dust somewhere, or worse…did you even write them down?
Let’s talk a bit about that today. Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. Thanks so much for joining today.
I was sitting in a coaching meeting with some clients the other day and they were a bit dejected. Felt like they were stuck.
“We’re not making any progress!” they said. “We’ve been trying to move forward on just keep fighting the same battles.”
“Well, let’s look at that.”
Here’s the best part. At BoP we do 12 week goals…small bite sized 12 week plans to keep the business moving forward. Instead of spinning your wheels for a year or more, you can stay on course and refocus every 12 weeks.
So, we pulled up their 12 week plan. We had 3 goals written down with a minimum of 10 action steps to accomplish each. As we walked down their list of goals, they realized they had made tons of progress! They were over 50% there for each of their goals!
They just had to refocus, realize that they were not, in fact, stuck, and recommit to the action items they had written down.
They left the office the other day realizing that they were doing the things that mattered. They were held accountable to a plan and were able to continue checking things off as they moved towards 3 goals that would transform their business by the end of the year.
So, back to you. What goals did you write down? Where are they? How do you track them? Have you tracked them this year? If not, why not?
Recent research suggests that most goals are abandoned less than 25 days into being set. 25 days!!! I think we have to ask ourselves why.
The first reason is we give ourselves too much time to accomplish the goals. I don’t know if you remember being in school and being assigned a semester paper. Are you starting that thing week one? Heck no! It’s so far off I have plenty of time to get to that. So you put it on the shelf until it’s pressing. It collects dust until you realize it becomes urgent! Don’t lie and act like you were one of the gold medal students that finished your stuff months ahead, we know the truth!
But how about when you were given a big assignment that was due by the end of the week. You get going on it now! It’s urgent. To get it finished it can’t sit on the shelf, but has to move forward step by step until it’s done on time.
Goals are no different. We give ourselves too much time to get the work done and either forget about it or put it off until it becomes urgent. That’s why we use 12 week plans. It keeps goals constantly in front of us so we never cease to move the ball down the field.
The second reason is that some goals need to be broken down into smaller goals. Doubling sales is difficult! And can feel overwhelming, so why not figure out some intermediate goals and metrics to incrementally push towards that. Instead of making one giant leap. Set goals that help you move towards the one big goal.
Lastly, I think we don’t look at them practically enough. We write these big goals down and don’t write out the action steps. We don’t give ourselves some easy wins to get momentum. As a result we fail or cease to get moving. Give yourself some action items that can contribute to your goals. Just make a list. What helps me accomplish this. A minimum of ten steps or action items. Set up time to critically think about it and strategize. Then just set some work time to make it happen. Then, set up a time to audit the work. For my clients, we do this every two weeks at our coaching meetings. Intentional time set aside to make sure we’re making progress.
And here’s the secret. It works! It’s not a magic wand, but intentional time set aside to work on goals works! Who knew?
So, if you’re in the group that hasn’t checked out your goals since January…no shame! Pull them off the shelf, break them up into bite sized chunks, and make a plan move forward. And if you need help with accountability, reach out! We’d love to help you stay focused and accomplish your mission as a business.
Thanks so much! Have a great day.
Greedy Boomers are feeling frustrated and overrun by entitled Millennials, while skeptical Gen Xers are interviewing unaware Gen Zers who are scrolling TikTok in a job interview; and for the first time we are all working together in the same businesses.
College sports is awash in generational misunderstanding. The newly minted Name, Image, and Likeness rules are in place and for the first time in our lifetime you are seeing college athletes representing the hometown HVAC company, or in some cases, an international brand like Alabama’s Quarterback Bryce Young who is already being featured in Nissan commercials.
En masse the younger generations are all for this loosening of regulations, the older generations are on the spectrum between skeptical and opposed.
In his new book A New Kind Of Diversity, Author Dr. Tim Elmore highlights these generational challenges saying, “the generation gap is more distinct because new technology creates subcultures. Hence, generations often don’t have to connect to survive.”
When you look around your business you are beginning to see a Boomer (55 and older) working side by side with a Gen Xer, a Millennial, and a Gen Zer, all staring cross-eyed at the other trying to figure out why they are so peculiar and strange…and wrong.
Generational diversity in the workplace is an unavoidable reality and a massive opportunity. Our response to this reality makes waves; waves of optimism and hope, or waves of pessimism and doubt.
First, to provide the greatest amount of optimism for working within the healthy diversity of the generations we must be aware that rightness and wrongness is being replaced with angle and perspective.
The commonly agreed upon straight edges of society are becoming less and less agreed upon and in their place are the self-published perceptions of the generations.
We used to believe that only a few key players had their fingers on the submit buttons of our societal publishing houses, and now everyone can and does publish something.
The voices of angle and perspective are rising and it is leaving little space for a declaration of rightness or wrongness.
You have a couple of different responses to this reality; we can either dig in our heels and fight for limited options, or we can open your ears and our minds to listen.
Listening is not agreeing.
Listening is not acquiescing.
Listening is not giving permission.
Listening is simply listening.
To be generationally aware is to make time to listen to the different angles, and then to make further time to digest and process what you have sincerely heard.
We will do well to inform our own current angles and perspectives with the angles and perspectives of others as we make time to listen.
The second action we can take to bring hope to the generations is to believe that each person and each generation brings a value layer that was otherwise missing.
Recently we did some renovation work at our home. The project was 99% complete barring a few pieces of artwork. The rooms looked fantastic! The new floors, paint, trim, and tile were all a pop of design that we had been missing.
There was 1% missing though…the artwork.
Most of us went through school moaning about art class. The addition of that 1% that was missing completely brought wholeness to the room.
In a Wikipedia entry, resolve is what the music world refers to as “the move of a note or chord from dissonance (an unstable sound) to a consonance (a more final or stable sounding one)”.
In our renovation, something was missing.
The 1% of artwork brought resolve; brought a more final visual to the renovations we had completed.
Multiple generations working in concert help to bring resolve to a workplace; a more final or stable sounding environment by which all roles can contribute to the overall mission of the organization.
By collectively and repetitively pressing towards that agreed-upon mission, culture is built, and the flavor of that culture is enhanced by the diversity of its generational ingredients.
Generational awareness is to learn the intentionality of great listening, and to set the stage for each generational player to bring the ingredients and notes that provide a full resolve and satisfaction for the culture that is headed towards its mission.
Our family feels like it's been stuck inside for so much of the last month. Some sick kids, tons and tons of rain, brutally hot weather that we thought was finally behind us, you name it!
And yet with the cooler temps yesterday we took advantage of it and took a long family walk. Something we used to do nightly that just had been pushed aside as life got in the way. The simple, little things! We were reminded of how much life this gives us as we played "I spy" the entire walk and had some sweet moments racing each other to the next mailbox.
I came home and immediately thought, why do we forget to do the little things? Because we know, deep down, the little things make the biggest difference for small businesses.
Good morning everyone! Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here.
I was sitting in with a client a few weeks ago who had not been coaching with me for very long and I was asking them about what separates them from some of the bigger companies doing what they do?
“Well, not that much anymore!” As I leaned in a bit and asked them to elaborate, they proved my point.
“Well, when we first opened it was this thought of superior customer service meets the highest quality. We returned every phone call. We wrote handwritten thank yous to clients after big jobs. We spent extra time on the details. We spent time as a team making sure everything was lined up. And as we’ve grown, it feels like there is less and less time for all of that! We’ve kind of lost our way a bit.”
Does any of this sound familiar? Well, it should. That’s the secret sauce of most small businesses. It’s the knowing the name of a client. Or remembering a team members birthday and that they are gluten-free! It’s the random handwritten note that shows up in your mailbox instead of some whitewashed thank you email with your name inserted.
It’s someone actually answering your call and getting a human on the line instead of a “press 0 to talk to a customer representative.” Or having a weekly check-in with your team to hear their thoughts and get feedback from the boots on the ground.
But what happens? Business picks up. The fires grow bigger. The team grows. The daily and weekly checklists get thrown out for the almighty sales funnel, because sales solves all. And yet you look up 5, 8, 10 years from your start and barely recognize who you’ve become as a business!
So, this is my simple reminder to you to ask you…what little things used to set you a part that have now kind of fallen by the wayside. This is a simple reminder to dive back in on those things that may have been neglected because of "insert excuse here!” I know I'm guilty of it.
Dive back in on BIG Wins and team check-ins. Dive back in on an effective team meeting and reestablishing your core values. Pull up a Job role and refresh it. Look back at your weekly schedule and time block your week out. Delegate one thing today. Build out a new process to make something more efficient. Shoot maybe it’s just calling a customer to thank them for their business out of the blue! Whatever you've set aside in favor of more important things, bring it up and set aside the time for a bit. I'd imagine that you, like me, would find it refreshing and completely worthwhile!
So, here’s what I’m going to ask you to do. Write down 10 things that you did when you started out your business that truly set you apart. Now, take one step further. How many of those things do you still do? Have you lost your secret sauce? And be honest, if you’ve only done it once this year and you used to do it weekly, that does NOT count.
Now pick 2 that are seriously important. How can you reimplement these into your routine? How can you recapture a bit of that magic that you had? Maybe remember a bit of why you got into this in the first place. Maybe it’s getting your team together and showing them the list and delegating one to each of them.
We can’t lose the soul of our business as sales increase. It’s what got us the sales in the first place!
So gather your team up this week. Put an appointment on the calendar to think this stuff through. Recapture the things that truly separate you from everyone else and watch the joy come back into what you do!
It takes intentionality and leadership, but you’ve got that! Now you just have to do it.
Thanks so much y’all get after it!
Thomas and I were doing our weekly check-in when we got to the last statement after I had asked him the Check In questions (Thomas walks you through the Check In questions here), “what I see and what I need from you.”
At this stage of our business, my role is requiring more and more visioneering and more accountability to macro-level task items. If my head gets caught up in too much day to day strategy, then we are not maximizing where I am most valuable to the business as an owner.
Note: for context, at the time of this writing/recording we are a team of eight with five full-time coaches and three focused roles to share clients connections, marketing, and administration/accounting.
Thomas heard what I am seeing in him and the growth that he is heading towards in leading our coach team, I then shared a thought I had not spoken, but it made sense.
“Thomas, I need you to run defense on questions, thoughts, and ideas that I could easily run with and get lost in.”
Ownership is lonely, and ownership can be misunderstood.
Leading the business from 60,000 feet requires a challenging juggling act of realizing the impact of each decision on the business as a whole, and the impact of each decision on each individual and their professional and personal life.
At times those disparities can seem to be in conflict and the urge is for the owner to abandon the skies and crash back to the ground to make sure everything is ok and in the midst unintentionally show distrust to the wildly capable team that is managing the ground game.
At that moment I was asking Thomas to recognize when I feel the urge to rush back down to earth in moments where it is clear that I need to remain in the sky to test and evaluate the atmosphere for the future vision of the business.
Each of us has blind spots, areas that no matter how hard we look, we are simply unable to see and we need other team members to “have our back” and to say something when they see something.
I’ve asked many of our team members to have my back at different times and in different ways, this is simply one example.
Who do you have that can ensure you are able to stay in the clouds for a bit and do the important work ON the business?
If there is no one right now, do not be discouraged, instead, be on the lookout.
There is a high likelihood that the person already exists in your business but simply has not been trained, groomed, and invested in, to the point of being able to have those open conversations.
By developing these conversations, the have-your-back mindset begins to work both ways.
I’m reminded of a scene in The Gladiator where the new Gladiators were being attacked from all sides and Maximus (Russell Crowe) led his men into a 360 circle which each man facing outward (backs to each other)...THAT’s the image!
Here are three ways to develop a have-your-back culture:
First, begin hosting weekly or every-other-weekly Check In’s in your business.
Watch Thomas’ instructional and informational video to record and deliver each of the questions and that important final statement.
Second, you can build a simple culture calendar on a spreadsheet.
Write out dates along the top row of a spreadsheet (week by week). Then on the left hand column (usually Column “A”) write out all of the cultural elements you wish were installed in your business; team meetings, birthdays, check ins, team training days, etc.
During each weekly team meeting review your culture calendar and watch the connection, communication, and relationships begin to develop in a powerful way.
Finally, share BIG Wins at every team meeting and make some of those BIG Wins the actions of your team members who really pulled their weight on certain items. Don’t be “too cool” for this step. Your team will buy in and appreciate it over time.
Who can help you run defense on your time so you can MAKE time for the things that really matter…at work and at home.